Friday, July 08, 2011

Monster Employment Index Reaches 2.5 Year High

Today's employment report from the BLS was pretty bleak, with only 57,000 new private sector jobs added in June, bringing the unemployment rate up to 9.2% last month, the highest level since last December's 9.4% rate.

The labor market news from today's Monster Employment report on online job demand and recruitment activity for June was a little more upbeat, with the Monster Employment Index increasing to the highest level since October 2008 (see chart above). Other highlights include:1. The Monster Index grew at an annual rate of 4% in June, marking the 17th consecutive month of year-over-year growth.

2. By industry, 13 out of 20 sectors showed annual growth in online job demand, with the mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction industry leading the Monster Index with a 60% yearly increase, followed by utilities with a 25% annual gain. More evidence here that drill, drill, drill = jobs, jobs, jobs.

3. 26 of the 28 metro markets recorded positive annual growth in job demand for June, with Minneapolis leading (+24%) the country, followed by Detroit (+22%), Cleveland (+18%) and Cincinnati (+18%). The only metro area with an annual decline in job demand was Washington, D.C., which experienced a -7% decrease in June.

From Monster Worldwide Senior VP Jesse Harriott:

“It is encouraging to see that the Monster Employment Index U.S. has reached its highest level since October 2008 and has shown continued growth in the current economic cycle. Expansion in recruitment activity for the commerce sectors, like retail and wholesale trade in particular, is a positive indication of continued momentum in economic activity.”

Update: The chart below shows the strong correlation between: a) BLS private payroll jobs and b) the Monster Employment Index over the last 7.5 years.

31 Comments:

The Monster Index is growing but Year over Year it is falling, according to the Monster report. Hmm? Does this mean that overall hiring prospects are down except for a continuing core of skilled oriented positions in the private sector?

We have a couple of million electricians, pipefitters, concrete workers, carpenters, machinery operators, factory workers, and general laborers out of work. I'm not sure those people are big users of "Monster."

you want ot see the failure of greenspan's (and now bernanke's) loose money policies?

there's the chart.

all 3 recessions since greenspan took over have been "outliers" in terms of job recovery.

they are the three slowest recoveries since ww2 by 100%.

that's an astounding figure.

he got away with it for the 2 shallow ones, but the loose money of 2000 turned an easily fixable bubble into this disaster.

fools like bunny will continue to misunderstand (i note you drop off every thread once i post the actual japanese numbers, but then pop up on the next one spewing the same lines with never a rebuttal) and fail to see that if you sell your debt abroad and have high net investment inflows, QE has the opposite effect it would if you were a closed system.

this is why rate ROSE during both qe periods.

it's not that it wasn't enough, it's that it caused more foreign selling. we got no growth, just bubbles.

job openings are only economically meaningful if you can fill them and that is not happening.

they are only a leading indicator if suitable candidates can be found, and they cannot.

every tech company i talk to is having trouble hiring. for the most part, roofers make poor semiconductor designers.

we have a skills mismatch driven by the construction collapse and our ruinous immigration policies and we have lower labor mobility due to underwater mortgages created by this failed experiment in promoting home ownership.

this monster index will continue to be irrelevant until those factors are addressed.

No, I disagree. It is showing where present and near future growth prospects are in the economy. The economy is not frozen or falling except for construction, which was the recipient of a tsunami of misallocated and leveraged capital for many years.

It is going to take a long time to work through this mis-allocation and the resultant deleveraging.

i agree. this is a great time to have those sorts of skills. demand is exploding and supply is ruthlessly tight.

all the social networking start ups are being forced to hire brand new college grads at 6 figure salaries and provide all sorts of perks (as in the late 90's).

they literally will take any warm body with even rudimentary computer skills, but we still cannot fill the jobs.

that never ends well. they wind up overpaying for low productivity and going BK. i had a front row seat for this running the tech group and VS arm of a fund in san francisco in the 90's. all the same stupidity is coming back.

it's interesting that such a labor bubble can persist while u6 is in the high teens. back then, we had u3 at 4%, which is extraordinarily low and thus, such a tight market seemed plausible, but with this kind of un and under employment, it shows severe skills and mobility issues.

i find it fascinating that the value of a degree in byzantine literature drops every year, while that of engineering and computers skyrockets, yet students are not flowing to those disciplines.

is it that they don't understand the economics? is it that they don't want to compete with the asian students and would rather drink beer? are they so poorly prepared that they CANNOT succeed in sciences?

i really wonder about that. you would think that such a discrepancy would be self correcting, but it actually seems to be getting worse.

"No, I disagree. It is showing where present and near future growth prospects are in the economy. "

that is where i think you are wrong.

it only shows demand for certain skillsets.

if that demand is not meetable because people have the wrong skills or cannot move, then this is not a sign of "growth prospects" but rather of forthcoming stagnation as the companies and the economy operate below potential due to unfilled jobs.

there is really no plausible way to claim that this index should be a leading indicator by more than about 3 months.

look at it 3 months back. it certainly did not do anything to predict this very aggressive slowdown.

i'd love to see that stats on how old these listings are (like days on the market in real estate) and on the percentage that get filled. i'll bet the former is way up and the latter way down.

Morganovich says: "all 3 recessions since greenspan took over have been "outliers" in terms of job recovery...they are the three slowest recoveries since ww2 by 100%."

I'm surprised you didn't also blame Reagan or GWB.

From 1982-07, the U.S. had one of the greatest eras of prosperity.

Job growth was slower after the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions, in part, because higher skills were needed in the Information Revolution, while larger trade deficits had a negative effect on employment, but a positive effect on living standards.

The even slower recovery from the current recession is the result of Pelosi-Reid-Obama keeping one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake, which is very expensive (and interior secretary Ken Salazar also assisted with "keep boot on the neck").

Morganovich, you make so many false assumptions, I don't know where to start. So, I'll just explain one of them.

Between 2000 and 2007 (after the structural bull market ended), the U.S. had a quick and massive "creative-destruction" process (and in a mild recession, mostly because of the Fed), which made not only Information-Age industries much more efficient, but also older industries.